“I select the moment that the video freezes. Time stops in the frame. The stasis escapes the screen into the room, the clocks stop, nothing moves, perfect silence. I am a living statue, never to move or breathe again. The video sequence reanimates but reality remains frozen, dead. Cars do not move. Jetliners float forever hundreds of feet above the ground filled with frozen passengers. The stars do not move. It will be night forever, now.

The spectators are no longer seeing or alive, they are dead in time. But there are recordings. On devices. On screens. Moving. Not like memories, or even ghosts. Time stopped everywhere, forever. Because we had evicted it into records, recordings, detections, data, and, eventually, the lag ripped a hole in the entire affair, right where life once intersected it.

Now times moves only in the recordings. Playing on infinite repeat. Repeat. On. Playing. I select the moment that the video freezes. Time stops in the frame, but the stasis escapes… and inverts.”

— an intelligence agent